


a blue million miles

by honey_wheeler



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: F/M, Future Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-15
Updated: 2013-07-15
Packaged: 2017-12-20 06:18:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,302
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/883928
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/honey_wheeler/pseuds/honey_wheeler
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Perhaps he was only ever meant to love them both.</p>
            </blockquote>





	a blue million miles

**Author's Note:**

  * For [supernatasha](https://archiveofourown.org/users/supernatasha/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Not Broken, Just Bent](https://archiveofourown.org/works/875788) by [supernatasha](https://archiveofourown.org/users/supernatasha/pseuds/supernatasha). 



She is little like her sister.

There had been a time in his life Gendry had believed there was only one type of person you could love. ‘Course, love wasn’t the same as fucking, and he had no illusions about how many types of people you could fuck – he may be naïve in some matters, but he’s never been stupid – but love always seemed a different beast. Arya was only a child when he’d first known her, a child with many names – Arry, Weasel, Nan – but they’d all been Arya and he’d loved her then in the raw, unformed way of youth. Years later, when she’d returned taller and fiercer and more long-faced than ever, his love for her had changed, transforming with desire into something altogether new. It was fitting; a new sort of love for a new sort of person, an Arya who was still the girl he’d loved but not the person he’d known. 

Every touch with her was fierce, every kiss consuming. Arya took him with nails and teeth, with the heat of her body blazing as if she were a star. And Gendry surrendered gladly to her gravity. She could kill him with the flick of her wrist, and he could only love her, lie with her, re-tie the threads between them that had broken when he stayed with the Brotherhood and she’d found a new world on the far side of the sea.

Those threads still hold somehow. Even in her absence.

Gendry’s youth had been mostly fire and soot and sweat. He’d imagined it was what his whole life would be – a stinking, sweaty forge in Flea Bottom making armor for the types of men he would never be and mostly wouldn’t want to. Then when everything had gone pear-shaped, he’d thought it would never be his life again, until he once more found himself in front of a forge, making armor and weapons for a different sort of man entirely. Now he can step outside yet another forge in yet another life and into the crisp air of Winterfell, and be surprised anew each time. He can drag that sweet, clean air into his lungs and hold it there, as if it might soak up the years of soot and make him as clean as this new life he’s found.

He tries not to sully everything he touches. At the end of each day, he scrubs himself with icy cold water and a brush with bristles so stiff he nearly cuts himself with it until it grows softer from use. Some grime will never leave – the dark crescents beneath each fingernail, the soot that seems permanently embedded in his knuckles – but he makes his best effort and it seems worth it when Sansa smiles in welcome at him, bidding him sit beside her at the large, empty head table in Winterfell’s hall. More than once he’s thought to suggest dining in a smaller room, but there is a steel in her spine at these meals, and he thinks it a mark of pride to carry on the custom of her parents, refusing to acknowledge that Winterfell is a shell of its former self. And he is too pleased to be asked to sit at her side, too desperate for even the most tenuous web of family.

She’s the last of her line here, the only Stark in Winterfell. He’s no line to speak of at all. There’s a certain poetry to the two of them together.

It had been she who kissed him at first. He wanted that kiss – had wanted it for months – but he couldn’t allow himself to take it, not on his own, not with Arya sitting heavy on his conscience or with the memory of Sansa’s confessions in his ear, all that she’d been through before finally returning home. But it was she who turned to him, who tipped her face up to be kissed and breathed his name over his lips. Her kisses are sweet in a way different from Arya’s. Her lips hold the promise of summer and music, the safety of peace. It’s a peace that’s hard-won, as much for her as it was for Gendry; perhaps that’s what gives everything between them such sweetness. Neither had thought they’d live to see such a thing. 

He comes to know her in scraps and pieces, learning her fears, understanding her hopes, seeing the twin threads of her strength and fragility in the curve of her mouth, the shell of her ear, the golden glint of downy hair over her belly and thighs when she shifts her knees apart and welcomes him between them. He’s greedy for her, pulling her to him with insistent hands that he does his best to gentle. She makes him strong in his weakness for her. If Arya had been the fire of his forge, Sansa is the water that anneals the metal. Coming to know Sansa makes the sisters seem less like opposites and more like halves, or perhaps each one the other turned inside out.

Perhaps he was only ever meant to love them both.

“Do you miss her?” he often thinks of asking Sansa, but he knows that she does. The question would be more for himself, a way of exorcising this demon that stays trapped in his chest, climbing his ribs as if they’re the rungs of a ladder. He misses Arya with an ache so profound that sometimes it seems almost pleasure, a wretched self-indulgence that only grows more confusing when he lays with Sansa, pain and pleasure tying into a knot only she can untie. But which “she”? The answer swims at the edges of his vision, slipping away when he attempts to focus on it and there only if he looks the opposite way.

Whenever Sansa is nowhere to be found, he knows where she’s gone. At first he’d let her be, thinking she’d not want him there, would not welcome anyone’s company, let alone his. Then one day she’d taken his hand and led him to the crypts, her eyes on his in mute request, and he’d followed her down to where the Starks of Winterfell stood guard in rows, their stone eyes fixed on some distant past or equally distant future.

Even rendered in lifeless stone, Arya vibrates with barely-leashed energy, her effigy seeming to fairly lean forward off its pedestal. The sword across her lap is still young, barely tarnished in the dank air of the crypts. It sits across her knees, just as the swords of her ancestors do, of her father and brother and those who came long before. Gendry had made the blade himself, at Sansa’s insistence. He’d taken near a month to cast the hilt, a snarling wolf’s head for the pommel above an angular heart worked in copper at the center of the crossguard, one that Gendry crafted after diligent study of the abandoned anatomy texts in the Maester’s old chambers. Arya would have rolled her eyes at such softness – “A _heart_?” she would scoff – but he knows her; she would have appreciated it nonetheless.

Each time they visit the crypts, Sansa touches that pommel as if it’s truly her sister’s heart beneath her fingertips, as if she could reach Arya somehow through cold, cast metal. She too loved Arya as all her different selves, he knows. And perhaps she too is surprised at all the different ways of loving another. Gendry couldn’t know for certain; they speak little of such things. Words skim over their truths like a river over rocks beneath its surface. And so he only takes the hand she offers and lets her lead him from the crypts, up moldering stairs and narrow passageways, bringing him blinking into the cold light of day once more.


End file.
